So this week's workshop brought a few ideas to my Frontbrain... By that I mean the logical thinking bit of my brain as described by Professor Steve Peters in his book The Chimp Paradox. And it was due to being in the room actually trying concepts out, rather than running them in my head that has sparked the brain into life. It's all very well having a thousand ideas but soon something needs to happen. As I think Vaktangov is attributed to saying: "If we must improvise, then we must have action." I’ve been looking for where that is really from for years so I apologies for not referencing correctly, or indeed if it is really from someone else. But that concept is the same with everything in this world, without action there will be nothing, no movement, no discovery, nothing new, no potential. Nothing happens unless we make it so.​

This week we explored some very interesting things. I am obsessed with the simplicity of Tig, Just as Clive Barker is in his book Theatre Games. But I have a different take, I think. Tig is a game, a construction that we can use to hang other things on. In the school playground we don’t look at it like that, my children don’t, people coming to a piece of performer training don’t; unless you have a clear basis that they can hang their play on. On reflection this is what the Repetition Exercise in Meisner Technique is, or indeed the Ballgame from John Britton that we use so much at the moment in our practical sessions. But isn’t a piece of choreography just a construct too? Or a written playtext, a game of football, a fence that needs building?Right, so now you are wondering where Duncan is going here. Well I’m trying to point out, what I’ve said in classes countless times over the years to many participants, that although we play games in practice they are a vital part of our pre-expressive work (Barba, p216-234). These games can take us away from the thinking we generally do and let us concentrate on something more instinctive. Meisner’s Repetition was created to remove the need to be creating as we interact (Farquhar), therefore letting us just concentrate on the interaction, as we do in the great improvisation that is our life. I believe the theatre games of Barker and the exercises of Barba have the same purpose. They allow us to interact, so the games must be simple, they must be almost unseen, and unseeable.So in this session we played Tig, we looked at the interesting bit of Tig; the bit where you nearly get caught or you nearly catch. This is where we are in the realm of Britton and his “pursuit of pleasure” and then we started thinking of how the game is often more prominent than the interaction, in fact it becomes the interaction. So we want it to be more background, not foreground, something that has our attention, but not all of it. So we played Tig but really slowly and started to think of it like the Hat Game in Improv (Hat Game). The game is important, but the reality, the interaction is as (if not) more important.This brought us to stopping and starting of the Ballgame, at your pleasure. Which brought out questions of when do you stop and start? Why do you stop and start? What is the purpose of the stopping and starting? What if the others in the room don't stop, or if they go with your offer? But what is the end of the game? How do we all end, as we do in Playback Theatre? How do we ALL choose to end, or all start? These are big questions, but I have to muse on this for a while so we’ll come back to this because it is a fundamental of this work… I’m pretty sure.One of the other questions for tonight was: what is the purpose of any exercise? The end result is important to know... especially for the participants. they want to know where they are going, they want a map. So here we are back at the first Blog. Nuts… must make more progress.BibiographyBarba, E. & Savarese, N. 2006. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. Routledge, London.Barker, C. 2010. Theatre Games: A New Approach to Drama Training. Methuen, London.Britton, J. 2010. The pursuit of pleasure, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 1:1, 36-54.Farquhar, Keith. 2014-15. Meisner Technique Training. West Yorkshire Theatre Network & Moment to Moment Acting, Sept 2014-Sept 2015. Leeds.Hat Game. Improvencyclopedia. [Online]. [Accessed on: 18 October 2017]. Available from: http://improvencyclopedia.org/games//Hats.htmlPeters, S. 2015. Steve Peters. [Online]. [Accessed on: 18 October 2017]. Available from: https://vimeo.com/117393454Peters, S. 2012. The Chimp Paradox: The Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness. Random House, Croydon.